Has social media use made us feel less safe?
Ilinda Parham had lived in Memphis a long time. She grew up in East Memphis and lived in Midtown and Downtown before moving back to East Memphis when she got married. But in July 2016, she, her husband and their two children moved out of the city.
Homes and vehicles in Parham’s neighborhood were being burglarized, and when the alarm at their home went off, Parham’s husband drove back to East Memphis from his Germantown office and beat the Memphis police there.
Moving to the suburbs made sense for Parham. It was closer to her husband’s work and their church. The family could afford a larger home and they would be in a good school district for their two sons, now 11 and 12, she said earlier this year. Parham said public safety and police response times were also deciding factors.
“We said our next house is going to be in Germantown,” she said. “Mainly for the reason that the police are so quick to get there.”
For decades, Americans have moved from cities to suburbs in search of more space, lower taxes and better school systems, in addition to lower crime rates and shorter police response times. The trend continues today, and Memphis has been no exception.
Memphis’ population declined from 2000 to 2010, before ticking back up slightly in recent years, data and estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau show. Bartlett, Collierville and Germantown have all seen their populations grow with Bartlett experiencing an almost 60% increase in its population since 2000, up to more than 59,000 residents, according to 2018 census estimates.
Memphis has experienced several high profile shootings, fatal and non-fatal, in recent months and is on pace for more homicides this year than last. Those well-publicized events can make crime seem more prevalent than it is. It has not been a straight line downward, but overall crime did decline in the entire Memphis metro area from 2009 to
2018, according to data compiled annually by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Germantown, Bartlett and Collierville — which have their own police departments and can provide localized data — have seen their overall crime rates rise and fall year over year. Law enforcement officials say that is typical in communities with smaller populations and perpetually low crime rates. Violent and property crime rates remain consistently low and the cities routinely make it onto lists touting the "safest cities in Tennessee."
Surveys from the Pew Research Center and Gallup have found that as crime has steadily decreased across the country, a majority of Americans believe crime has been increasing nationwide. When asked if they think crime has increased locally, fewer people say yes, but the numbers still don’t match the consistent declines seen in crime rates.
The vast majority of crimes are committed by people known to the victim and people who live in poverty are more likely to experience violent crime, regardless of race or whether they live in an urban or rural environment, according to the U.S. Justice Department. Many of the people with the financial means to move from a city to the suburbs are statistically less likely to be the victim of a crime in the first place.
Perception vs. reality
Perceptions of safety are formed by personal experiences with crime, media consumption, impressions of neighborhoods and relationships citizens have with their police departments — including how those departments communicate with the public — more than statistics, according to research published by the National Institute of Justice and by researchers at the University of West Virginia. And how safe people feel is an important factor in where they choose to live, Germantown deputy police chief Rodney Bright said.
“One of the things at the forefront of people’s minds is safety,” he said. “People want to be safe where they live, where they recreate, where they own a business."
Raymond Kennedy lived in Memphis throughout high school and as a young adult, buying a house in East Memphis when he and his wife got married and started having children. He loved their neighborhood but had a lingering thought in his mind that if something happened to his family, he wouldn’t feel like he had done everything he could to keep them safe.
Kennedy said it was “a little disheartening” to move from Memphis to Germantown but it was the best decision for his family. He recently witnessed a traffic accident and said the police arrived in a minute and a half, a much quicker response time than when he interacted with Memphis police.
“There’s just no concern. The police presence is just so much more vigilant,” he said.
In Germantown, the police department measures success against a series of benchmarks — response times, violent crime clearance rates and overall crime rate — set by examining other cities of similar size in the southeastern U.S., Germantown Police Department Capt. Mike Fisher said. The police department has an average response time of under 4 minutes, according to the city website. In Memphis, the response time can depend on the call; violent crimes are prioritized and it can take police longer to respond to non-violent calls, skewing the average response time.
The department also tracks those numbers to make decisions about how to adapt officer deployment and about whether additional officers need to be hired or the city needs to be split into additional districts. In Germantown — and other suburban Memphis communities — the crime rate remains consistently low. But that means even a few instances can cause a spike in a city’s annual crime rate.
“The numbers have been low enough that it doesn’t take many offenses to change our (crime) rate,” Fisher said.
Mean world syndrome
From insurance commercials featuring crowbar-wielding burglars to TV shows that kill off half the characters before the first commercial break and news reports about violent crime, people are exposed to thoughts and images of crime constantly.
Posts on Nextdoor warning of "suspicious" people, often accompanied by blurry pictures taken by security cameras or smart doorbells, and Facebook posts lamenting increased crime in a once-sleepy community are almost as common as pictures of lost dogs and auto mechanic recommendations in most communities.
In reality, the Memphis suburbs remain largely quiet. During a recent fourhour ride-along, a Germantown police officer issued a warning for a driver with a broken tail light, talked with a person who reported a colleague made comments about self-harm and removed a snake from a backyard. Weekly logs published by the city show entire days where no crimes are reported.
Researchers have been studying the effects of TV violence on Americans for decades and have documented how TV viewers come to believe the real world mirrors the violent world seen on the screen, known as "cultivation theory." Research indicates it has a greater effect on avid TV watchers, who sometimes come to see the world as a scary place where others can’t be trusted, known as “mean world syndrome.”
Melissa Janoske, who teaches crisis communication and public relations at the University of Memphis, said those viewing experiences heighten “emotional fear.”
“When we see violence and crime and things like that on TV, we have emotional fear but not a situational fear,” she said. “It heightens the fact that crime exists in the world and that makes us emotional, that makes us nervous, it makes us feel like ‘I need to watch myself.’”
While the research cannot be directly applied from television to social media, some experts say it can have similar effects. Janoske has researched how people use social media in crisis situations, including the viral posts that seem to pop up with every hurricane, showing a shark swimming on a highway or inside a building.
“People get so caught up in being afraid that they see that and they think ‘Holy crap, there’s a shark on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The world is at its end,’” she said.
Similarly, when they see a frightening crime-related post on social media, they might not use critical-thinking skills. Someone can get on Nextdoor, a hyper-local social media network that is intended to function as an online neighborhood bulletin board, and say they saw a person wearing a hoodie acting suspiciously. That post can snowball and result in some innocent person in a hoodie being accused of a crime, Janoske said.
Bright, the GPD deputy chief, said social media posts sometimes force the department to react, at times bringing important issues to the department’s attention and other times sending officers to track down rumors that turn out to be embellished or untrue.
Social media relationships
This exact issue has caused Nextdoor a lot of strife. The site has been decried for repeated instances of racial profiling by users and after widespread public backlash, Nextdoor was forced to make changes to how "suspicious" activity is reported by users.
While social media sites can be conduits of negative forces, there have been positive benefits to the platforms, Janoske said. Social media can help connect people in the same neighborhood or across a metro area and serve as a jumping off point for positive change in a community.
“When we feel like we are part of a group, we feel like we can do more to help solve problems,” she said. “It can be helpful for people to see that there are all these other people out there on Twitter and Facebook who care.”
Lt. Jeremy Springer, who handles social media for the Bartlett Police Department, said overall he believes social media has made police work easier. The neighborhood message board-feel of Nextdoor and the ability to target individual areas of town have helped with public outreach, he said.
“Nextdoor is a great app. We can put information out to specific areas if we need to,” he said. "If there’s an uptick in car burglaries, we can let people in that neighborhood know to keep vehicles locked.”
However, there are downsides, including that some people use the site as a substitute for getting to know people in real life.
“We want people to understand that these are great tools, but we still want people to meet their neighbors and to get out and interact with people,” he said. “That’s the unfortunate side of our social media these days. Anyone can post anything whether or not it’s true."
And as social media becomes a substitute for interacting in the real world people interact less with people who disagree with them, Janoske said. That can mean no one is asking whether their fears are grounded in reality. She gave the example of someone looking to learn how to keep themselves safe from a tornado in an area almost never hit by twisters.
"If I am trying to figure out how to save us from tornadoes, we need somebody out there to say, 'Hey, this isn't something that happens here,'" she said.
Social media has also become a tool for documenting interactions with police. After several highly publicized incidents of white officers killing unarmed black men in the past decade, public awareness has increased around how interactions with law enforcement can be different for white people and people of color. Recording interactions with officers has become common, whether during a traffic stop or a call for service.
Activists have said the videos hold officers accountable while police have said the videos can frame interactions in a light that makes ordinary interactions seem negative. Springer said many times people's lives intersect with law enforcement, it is a negative incident.
“Typically when the public thinks of police they think of getting a ticket or someone getting arrested, negative things like that,” he said.
The amount of trust people have in their police department is a large component of how safe they feel. Department social media accounts allow police to control at least part of that conversation, pushing out happy news like officers assisting citizens with things like car seat checks or going to school career days and interacting with kids, Springer said.
Seeing those positive interactions is an important part of building trust between
Crime travels
Social media can also help with more traditional police work. Springer said he monitors posts from other area law enforcement departments as cities in the Memphis area often experience the same patterns and can help each other with identifying or locating suspects.
Abeln said all law enforcement agencies in the metro area work hand-inhand and that they sometimes see patterns repeated in multiple cities that can help identify and locate suspects.
“Everybody works together,” he said. “Crime does not know city limits.”
Kelly James, a Christian Brothers University professor who has researched criminology and policing, said there's a reason cities and suburbs usually experience increases and drops in crime rates in tandem. People from the suburbs will go into Memphis to buy drugs, for example, because there’s a perception illegal drugs are more common or easier to buy in the city, she said.
“The assumption is that there are more motivated offenders in the city,” for all types of crimes, James said. “That’s not necessarily true.”
But what worries people most, she said, are not increasingly common financial crimes like identity theft, but violent crimes — which remain rare in Memphis' suburbs — and property crimes like theft.
“We’re really mostly worried about the two feet around us and in our homes,” she said.
In a study by Safewise, a website that tests home and auto security devices and rates them, 72% of Tennesseans surveyed said property crime was their biggest concern, despite only 16% of respondents saying they experienced property crime in the last year.
Ultimately, feelings of safety are not about statistics, but about perception.
Germantown resident Roxanne Doyle moved from East Memphis to Germantown about two years ago, largely because of the school system. Despite having one attempted break-in, she said she never felt unsafe at her Memphis home and would have stayed if there had been higher-performing public high schools. She and her husband looked at homes in Germantown and Collierville, but settled in Germantown after finding the right house, she said in an email.
“It was bigger than our previous house which was nice and we are close to lots of walking trails, but I don’t feel any safer where we are now than where we were before,” Doyle said.
Corinne Kennedy is a reporter for the Commercial Appeal. She can be reached via email at Corinne. Kennedy@commercialappeal.com or on Twitter @Corinneskennedy